> So they started an interface from scratch, rather than fixing what was already there.
Because sometimes it's easier to start over from scratch than trying to untangle a big mess. There's only so much you can accomplish with incremenetal changes. Here, it wouldn't have been enough.
> And in the end Moz beat FF at its own game before they pulled the plug. This might not be fair though, since Moz was being used for testing optimizations for FF.
Yes, Mozilla was being used as the test suite, so it's only logical it would get the optimized engine first.
> As for the interface - are you sure? I have little faith in the ability of OSS to make a good interface. Moz's interface was made by Netscape. FF's is stunningly similar to IE, so you could argue that Microsoft came up with that one.
The Netscape 3.0 interface wasn't too bad. With 4.0, it got worse. Mozilla is only loosely based on this, and adds immense amounts of clutter.
IE's interface is quite simple and streamlined. MS had tons more resource to throw at interface design than Netscape ever had. The IE interface is fairly good. In this case, the Firefox team took it and improved it.
> But I don't actually buy the whole "better interface" argument. What are the large differences between the two? Other than a skin they seem to have mostly the same buttons along the top. The menu layout is different, but not hugely so.
You are probably not used to doing interface design. The thing with interfaces is that they are very, very subtle. It's the tiny details that matter, and the list of every such tiny detail in Firefox is far too long to list here.
The means may not be clear, but the result is: You can have pretty much anyone sit down in front of Firefox and they'll figure out how to use it pretty much instantly. And none of this is done at the expense of the ability of power users to do what they want. Both the well-designed interface and the extensions help with this.
> FF's success is more marketing and less merit, IMHO. Not much wrong with that; Mozilla was going nowhere.
The marketing was done by people who used it and loved it. It was only late in the game that the real marketing campaign got underway, as all the people who had been convinced by the program itself got organized and wanted to take on IE. Personally I've been using it since 0.1, and already then I found it the best browser on the market.